A Creative Coincidence OR Evidence of Synchronicity?

This kind of thing happens to me quite often.

The Eternal Art (image by author)

The Eternal Art

In February 2024, I started a fantasy fiction serial on Substack, called The Eternal Art.

I didn’t have any kind of plan at the beginning. I just started. And “just starting” was the impetus to keep going. I soon “found” a plan, week to week, episode by episode.

After a couple of months, I did have a plan, and a very rough outline for several future arcs of the story. By this point, I had realized who my main character was, and how he was connected to my Main Story.

SIDEBAR

The main story is a (mostly unwritten) 15-volume Epic Fantasy Saga. I’ve been working on the story world, in some capacity, since 2004. That’s 20 years. The main character in The Eternal Art is a secondary character in the Saga. But knowing who he BECOMES, I found it really interesting to discover who he WAS, and HOW he becomes his future self.

END OF SIDEBAR

AGALI

In May 2024, I first mentioned the name “Agali”, as a distant country where a Plot Point had occurred, it was just a word. It came to me like an autumn leaf landing in my lap. I didn’t know where it had come from, why it had come to me, or what it might mean to anyone else but me. The word came. I had plucked it out of the ether. The word felt right. And so the country became called Agali. To talk about the people or language of Agali, I used the adjective Agalin.

The Agalin Nation

Who are the Agalin people? Physically, they are dark-skinned and fine-featured people. In my head, they look South Asian. Their architecture is grandiose, they are skilled in ancient magic, and they are an Empire.

The story intersected with Agali for a few episodes, and then there was a geographical divergence that enabled me to not worry about the Agalin people or language for some months.

The Plan

Over the summer, I fleshed out a 15-arc storyline that will take me years to complete. Maybe I’m overdoing it. But at least I have some kind of plan to guide my actions and my story.

I didn’t necessarily choose the number 15 specifically. I noticed that this is also the number of volumes in the Saga. Maybe I like repeating patterns, but it just seemed like the right number. And it might change in the writing of it all.

Back to Agali

By October 2024, I needed to understand Agali better, and part of that is, naturally, the Agalin language.

The story has come back to Agali, and I need names (of people and places), and vocabulary items of all kinds. Until now, my main character has been insulated from such things, but soon he will begin to learn the Agalin language by being immersed in it. I have no idea (yet) what that will entail, and what words I’m going to need.

Conlanging

Conlanging is the act of creating a constructed language. People have many reasons to undertake such a project, that I won’t go into here, but mine is (obviously) to bring some sense of place and realism to my fictional country, just one of the settings in my Saga.

There are different ways to go about creating a fictional language. Because my fantasy world has periodic (magical) connections to our world, there is a certain amount of interconnectivity and shared history, or shared consequences. This gives me the excuse/opportunity to use real-world languages as a jumping off point for some of my conlangs.

For story reasons, the obvious candidate for an ancient influence on the Agalin language is Dravidian, or rather proto-Dravidian, and potentially any modern or historical Tamil language I come across as inspiration.

The Search

I started with my trusty Nostratic Dictionary. There is a good deal of controversy over whether Nostratic is a valid proto-language, or a valid method, but something that it does provide for certain is a lot of linguistic data in one handy location. One of the “branches” of Nostratic IS Dravidian. But the Dravidian entries are few and far between, and the document is large and a little unwieldy.

So I did an internet search, and found a searchable Dravidian dictionary.

While it is great to have a searchable database, there is also a certain joy in just browsing a dictionary. I’ve always done this, with English dictionaries as well as foreign language dictionaries. Call me a weirdo. Go on, I don’t mind.

I was disappointed to not be able to just let my gaze fall over a wordlist and have some of them just jump out at me. There is so much beauty and serendipity in foreign languages. I love it.

The First Result

I was at a loss, for a long moment, about what to search for. There is so much I might need words for, I didn’t know where to begin.

The first thing that came into my head was that Agali was a country, so that seemed as good a place as any to start.

The top result was:

“akal (akalv-, akanr-) akal (akalv-, akanr-) (p. 3)

width, expanse, greatness, earth, town, village, country; akalvu extent, expanse; akarci…”

That’s right. The initial candidate word for country in Proto-Agalin (Dravidian) was: akal

Coincidence or Synchronicity?

It’s random. Of course it is. It must be random. I had no knowledge of Dravidian in May when I coined the word “Agali”. I didn’t even realize that Dravidian might be a resource for building the language of the nation I had only just named.

But when this kind of thing happens (and this is not an isolated incident) it feels like it isn’t just a coincidence. It feels like there is meaning or significance to it. Almost like I discovered the right word by intuition or magic.

I know, I know: it’s just a coincidence. Right?

To Build a Language

And on the basis of this one coincidence, I can build out the entire language.

This was a single query, and I will have many more. But this single word can infer so much in the fictional history of the region.

Modern Agalin is not the same as any modern Dravidian language, and Ancient Agalin is not identical to Dravidian. But any word from any Dravidian language can now inform my ideas on Modern Agalin. Put another way, Dravidian is one starting point for the vocabulary of the conlang. It won’t be the only resource I use.

Evolution

Words change, all the time. People innovate. Slang comes and goes. Meanings shift.

Now that I have the basis for an ancient word “akal”, I can extrapolate all kinds of things from it. I can invent different grammatical cases, I can apply sound change laws, and I can come up with an explanation for how ancient “akal” became the modern name of the country called Agali.

Even though it all happened by accident.

Thanks for reading!

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